[TALK] Proving fundamental Unix guarantees

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Monday 30 June 2003 14:23, Adam Donnison wrote:
> Wiser heads than mine may well contradict me here, however my
> understanding is as follows.  BSS contains initialised global
> variables, however this is done by the compiler, not the OS.
> Other memory, allocated on either the stack or the heap, is
> not initialised and may contain trash.

I think if you want to claim your OS is secure you need to scrub pages before 
they get handed to processes..

By no means does this guarantee they'll be zero, but they certainly shouldn't 
contain anything written by the process that had the page before you.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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